Tag Annoyances

No more word smithing

Michael 7 Comments

I was building discussion points for a project in another part of my life and I got stuck for a word. I needed something to describe what someone who originates an idea does – or did. I thought “introduce” didn’t capture the work involved, “create” sounded too supernatural, “instigate” seemed somehow sinister, and “initiate” was much too formal. Well that exhausted the listings in my mental thesaurus. Time to dig up Mr. Roget’s best seller and see if I could find just the right set of letters to satisfy my word quest. I was actually out of the chair when I slapped myself in the forehead, fortunately not wearing a heavy ring, when I sat back down, keyed in o-r-i-g-i-n-a-t-e, hovered, and right-clicked on it.

  • Create (already eliminated that one)
  • Invent (no, not the feeling I’m after)
  • Initiate (again, I thought of that one without anybody’s help)
  • Instigate (still sounds sinister)
  • Make (dull)
  • Devise (wouldn’t have thought of that in a million years but that’s ok because I don’t like it anyway)
  • Patent (I’d argue that’s the same as originate but that’s just me)
  • Coin (ooh, good word – not the right word but a good one)
  • Begin (blah)
  • Derive (again, I argue that derive and originate are not synonymous)
  • [ ] (notice, they didn’t even come up with “introduce” like I did, not that it mattered)

In the end, or actually middle given that I’m still working on the project, I went with “originate” knowing I’ll never be completely satisfied that I did my best at creating an original set of discussion points. (See what I did there? Hmm?)

Although my mini-search hadn’t satisfied my curiosity for an appropriate substitute for “originate,” it raised my curiosity about words. I seem to end up with three of four posts about words and language each year. That’s a lot of words! I’ve gone back and forth to suggesting we need more words to we have too many words to we need better words. I know we need still need better words and I offer my ambivalence toward “originate” for proof. I’m not so sure we need more words, yet we keep inventing them. In one of those posts up yonder (or should I say heretofore mentioned), I wrote, “The English language is said to have close to a million words in it. I’m not sure who counted that but the most complete, or as they would put it unabridged dictionary of the English language, the Oxford English Dictionary, has about 620,000 words. But language doesn’t equal vocabulary. And vocabulary doesn’t equal language. The average educated English speaking person knows around 20,000 words and uses but about 2,000 words in a week.”

That was in 2017. Now things are even more confusing. The OED still contains over 620,000 listings, listings not words, many are duplicates because we use the same word for different uses. (See that. I did it again.) It lists (yep, again) 171,000 different words. But now those same sources say the average American English speaking person knows about 40,000 words. How did we double our word count in six years? For comparison, Classic Latin is composed of (comprised of?) 39,500 words.

There’s something not right here. I’m just not sure exactly how to express it.

Looking for your own perfect word? Practice your vocabulary. They say practice makes perfect, no? No! If no one can be perfect, why practice? Practice has to make something. What practice makes is a more positive you! Our most recent Uplift! digs into how that can be.

Go take a look for yourself. You can be there and back in about 3 minutes.

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Sugar, slice, and a couple things nice

Michael 13 Comments

It’s that time again. The dustbin of my brain needs emptying. Needs to be emptied? Whichever, it’s time to write out all those random thoughts and make room for new dreck, err, information. This time, though, we have some nice thoughts.

Let’s start with the spicier stuff! Spices.

Last week I made one of my favorite dinners. Oh, let’s be honest with each other. If it has a protein, a vegetable, and a starch, it’s one of my favorite dinners. Let’s call this one instead, one of those dinners I don’t often make and thoroughly enjoy whenever I get around to it, which might be once or twice a year – blackened catfish. When I need a blackening seasoning, I start with a commercial Cajun seasoning and add paprika, black pepper and thyme. As I was mixing my new blend I inadvertently grabbed a jar of “fish crust” instead of thyme. Fish crust is a proprietary blend used and sold by one of the local restaurants. I realized my mistake when greenish granules fell into my mix rather than the expected tannish dried flakes. Uh oh! I looked at what I was holding, glaring at the bottle that so looks like the one holding my dried thyme and asked what it thought it was doing, jumping out of the rack into my hand when I clearly called for thyme. “Dude, chill,” the traitorous container said, or so I imagined, “I got your thyme in me along with some parsley, cilantro, lemon, garlic, and salt. So it might be a little salty when it’s all done with what you’ve already out in there. Add an extra squeeze or two of lemon before you pull the fish out of the pan. Sheesh, do I have to think of everything?” And the bottle was right. It all worked out in the end and was extra yummy good.

Something else happened last week that wasn’t so fishy. Thursday I was working on the ROAMcare Motivation Moments that will hit the Internet over the next couple of months. I was stuck. I had a whole day with nothing to do but write as much as I wanted, and I couldn’t put two words together. I ran out of motivation to continue. You may remember not long ago I wrote here in the RRSB post Motivating the Motivators that I had worried that might happen some day. “There was a time when I thought that eventually we would run out of motivation. ‘Who is going to motivate the motivators?’ I would ask.” But then I confidently followed that up with, “but that thought was fleeting.” Fleeting my eye. Where were all the thoughts now. So I did what I usually do when I need a little extra oomph. I went off to read some old Motivating Moments. Sure enough, I found one to work for me in that moment. Two actually, one right after the other. The first reminded me that, “A good day isn’t just about hitting the high points. It’s about making it through the low ones too!” By gosh by golly, I had done a lot that day. I was just in a low point. I could climb out of it, or just hang around there and do something else until my brain re-opened for business. And if I didn’t, well, I had done a lot of work and there will be motivating moments still for weeks with what I’d already put in the can. And just as I was about to close that window in the computer, another Moment tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Psst, hey buddy. Look at me.” It nearly screamed at me across my screen, “Make the time to remind yourself how good you are.” By golly by gosh, we were right again. A slow point doesn’t make for a failed day. For every day’s disappointing minute, there are 1439 other minutes available to be better. And a few of those minutes, and a bowl of ice cream later, we were back in the writing business.

Shifting gears to something not motivating at all, to one of my favorite gripes – pickup trucks with an extra serving of testosterone. I was in my little roadster stopped at a traffic lights as red as the Miata itself. With all that red, you’d think even a dim witted macho man would know to slow down. A question I ask myself every now and then when I take the little convertible out is should I be wearing a helmet?  The state used to require it of motorcyclists but they ones now who don’t have pretty hard heads anyway. Usually I only get that thought when I’m in a parking lot next to a “look how big my pick(up) is” truck and then it goes away as soon as I encounter intelligent life again. Well at that light, I heard the rumble behind me and saw a monster of a truck coming in down the hill and there I sat, frozen in my seat, looking in the rear view mirror and not seeing the truck’s grill, not seeing its front bumper, but seeing its undercarriage and front end suspension bits! It was lifted so high off the road, it literally could ride right over me!! There was no shoulder to my right and oncoming traffic to my left. And that left me three choices, sit, pray, or get out of the way.  That’s when I shifted gears and red light or not, pulled forward into the intersection, made a quick check to the left, then one to the right, that a glance at the medal clipped to my sun visor that says, “Never drive faster than your Guardian Angel car fly,” apologized to my ever-present but unseen companion, and flew! I was across the intersection and safely on the side of the road when the monster truck hurtled by. I said a quick prayer of thanks and pulled back onto the roadway to continue my leisurely drive. About 2 miles down the road, Mr. Macho was looking down out of the cab of his metal manhood at the top of the nice officer’s head handing over his license, registration, and insurance. Who says prayers are never answered?

Okay, that’s it for this week’s random thoughts. Tune in again next week for another exciting episode of “What will he come up with now?”

Hey, while we speaking of spices, that reminds me about condiments. Did you know people are like condiments? We explain why we think so in the most recent Uplift! It only takes 3 minutes to read. Go ahead, click that link!

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A real job for Artificial Intelligence

Michael 7 Comments

A few months ago I came up with a few suggestions for how to work Artificial Intelligence into our lives. I have a few more, starting with making some sense of my WordPress subscriptions.

Most of the blog posts I read, I read in my email. For me it’s just easier as I can read a post, review the morning headlines, read a post, see which neighborhood was the scene of a shooting, read a post, check out the daily specials at Keurig, Lowe’s, and the local garden center, and then wrap up breakfast with a read of one more post. Last week I noticed my mailbox was quite thin on blog posts.

Given that it was Memorial Day week, the official day of remembering mattress sales, propane grill specials, and summer vacation deals, I thought a little more than nothing about it and assumed some of my favorite bloggers were taking a needed break. As the week went on, a few posts popped up, but the offerings were not even close to meager. A quick check on the WordPress Reader revealed some of the posts were there, but not in my mailbox, the couple that showed up in mailbox were not there in my Reader feed, and three lucky souls had their blogs in neither place. A quick back search through my subscriptions found them still active. Further investigation found I was no longer subscribed to many of the blogs and I began the arduous process of figuring out to which I was still subscribed, of those which was I still to receive notice, and of those was my contact information intact and correct.

So if you noticed some bizarre activity like me subscribing, unsubscribing, or maybe even doubly subscribing to your blogs, I offer my apologies while I continue to rebuild my subscription list.

And I offer, blog subscription maintenance as a fantastic job for some overachieving AI assistant.You know, maybe that’s the only one for this week.I mean, if it can figure out WordPress, it’s done plenty to earn my respect!

Can you be happy without being joyful? Can you be filled with joy and not be happy? The most recent Uplift! takes a closer look at these emotions.

Approximate reading time – 4 minutes

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I’ve been had

Michael 5 Comments

They’re out to get us!

In the course of 12 hours on Saturday I got 45 legitimate, expected emails. I thought that was a lot. That’s why I counted them. But there they were and there they were all with a reason for being there. They were headlines form the two local papers and headlines from the Associated Press and from Apple News and updates from two magazines I subscribe to. Three were from clubs or associations I belong to. There were five from Word Press, three new blogs from those I subscribed and two were stray “likes” to older posts of mine. A few were from stores I routinely order from, one was a delivery update on an order I am expecting. Oh yes, and there were even a handful from real people checking in. I had accounted for 45 emails that didn’t surprise me by being there.

Unfortunately during that 12 hour period, I had received a total of 141 emails. Sixty of those were shuttled to the Junk email box. That left 36. Those 36 were hanging out in my regular Inbox but weren’t expected to be there, nor were they from legitimate correspondents. Yes, they were spam. And not the tasty kind Hormel packs into those neat little tins. These were not only spam, they were phishing schemes designed to wheedle personal information to leverage my embarrassingly low financial accounts. Well, 28 of the 36 were phishing schemes. The other 8 were just annoying.

And just to make things a little more interesting, of the sixty emails that were sent to the junk folder, two were from my electric company following up on the power outages created by the storms during the previous week. Yes, the people who created the rules for our spam filters thought that I would be interested in “Real Russian women looking for love” but not in service updates from a legitimate public utility. [sigh]

Why do I bring this up now. Well, a couple of things happened that make this all a little more interesting. I don’t recall if I mentioned in a recent post but I am in the midst of a move, a personal relocation, a “pack everything you own into 80-100  itty bitty boxes and some strangers in a big truck will get them to your new abode” activity. One of the related activities is notify everybody who routinely sends you real mail – banks, insurance companies, magazine publishers, and such – of my new physical address. The last time I moved, all that sort of stuff had to be done in person or by phone. Now, many of them can be done on line. In the process of updating all the personal information profiles in all these sites are requests from them to add, confirm, or change any emails I’d want from them. From most I prefer no email correspondence. In fact, in most instances, I prefer no correspondence from them. Of course there were some companies I had not had a previous “internet connection” (tee her) and had to complete their profile including an email address along with a local street address, and all of them with the obligatory, “check here to confirm you have read and understand our 574 page statement of privacy practices.” Now I’m wondering if one of those that I so blithely clicked my way through was informing me they would be selling their mailing lists to the highest bidder. And maybe even the second and third highest bidders as consolation prizes.

Yeah, they’re out to get us, and I’ve been gotten.

Into everyone’s life rain falls. We can’t control what happens in life but we can control how we respond. That’s why in the most recent Uplift! We suggested that when life gives you lemons, make banana bread! Read about it here!

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Intelligently speaking

Michael 13 Comments

Somebody out there please note in the comments section if you have NOT heard ANYTHING about Artificial Intelligence written ANYWHERE ANYTIME since the beginning of this year. Oh My Gigabytes you can’t open a web page, a journal, a newspaper, an e-zine, and OG magazine, an ANYTHING without some reference to AI. AI wrote this, AI didn’t write this, AI picked this song list, AI can go screw itself. Arrggh!

First of all, those old enough to remember “The Jetsons,” isn’t this what we dreamed of? We wake up and a robot picks out our clothes, another makes our breakfast, there’s one offering us the morning AI written newspaper, and then off to our self-flying cars, whisking us to work where we push a button and a robot punches us in, and another prints out the day’s workflow completed by a series of techno bots. All before our morning coffee break.

If you’re concerned the robots are planning an uprising and are after your job, house, spouse, or pet mouse, listen up. They aren’t. But just in case, I say we get in front of the issue and work out a task list they can start with. For instance:

AI mediated email spam filters. Clearly deciphering “***L-A-S-T-C-H-A-N-C-E before we !SUSPEND! your account***” as a suspicious missive is too difficult for the unintelligent spam filters that come with our email providers. I bet if an AI bot can write tomorrow’s weather forecast, it can predict bad things will happen if a human opens that email.

AI mediated traffic signals. The next time you are stopped at a traffic light, look up. Up there where the lights are hanging. Yes, there. You will see a plethora, or a lot even, of doo-dads that read license plates, count cars going by, adjust the light brightness based on the ambient light, and hold pigeons up (crows in rural areas). But they can’t tell that I’m the only car there and within 3 blocks in any direction, idling away, waiting out the full 2 minute cycle before I can proceed. Clearly, we need a more intelligent traffic signal handler. While we’re out there on the road, it also would be nice if those signs on the highways that tell you it’s 2 miles to the next exit with food can tell you if the line at the drive thru is also 2 miles.

AI mediated laundry centers (also know as expensive washers and dryers sold in sets). I have said this before, the only instruction Americans can be counted to follow is “Dry Clean Only” and that’s only if they can decode the hieroglyphs that are taking over printed instructions. It was hard enough finding the tabs and making out handling instructions printed in light gray on white tags when they were written with words. You know: “cold water like colors lay flat to dry do not iron do not bleach do not wear to grandmas house are you sure these don’t make your butt look fat.” Now we have a picture of a highball glass with wavy lines in it and a slash through it. There might very well be a translation guide in the washer instruction book but that’s one of the instructions we don’t read so just give us an AI washer that can figure it out for us.

Okay. Now I think I’ll go fill a highball glass highway with bourbon, top it with more bourbon, and have enough of those until everything looks wavy while my robot vacuum cleaner picks up after me. Have a good day!

We make important choices every day and anyone of them, even the ones that may seem insignificant at the time, can be life changing. In Uplift! at ROAMcare.org we suggest treating them all as if they are. Go on and click it. It’s only a 3 minute read.

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And they’re off!

Michael 8 Comments

Well, 2023 sure came in like a bang! There have already been so many unexpected, unusual, unconventional, unplanned happenings happen, that if the whole year keeps going the way it started, I figure the earth will explode sometime around June.

For example, last week Congress met four days in a row! I tried to find the last time that happened and as near as I can figure, I came up with a week in April 1835.

For instance, just like prescription drug insurance deductibles reset at the first of the year, apparently so do e-mail spam filters. I hadn’t been congratulated for winning a Home Depot gift card, iPhone 14, the inside news for smart good traders, or the last space heater you’ll ever want since last January. Now I’m tagging at least a dozen emails like for exile to the Junk Folder.

For instasample, one day last week I was scrolling my way through the Instagram feed when I paused at one of the random posts they somehow figured I’d be interested in. Actually I was stopped there so I could back scroll to the TSA post I missed. (If you aren’t following the TSA on Instagram you really should be – they are the Number Pun site on the Interwebs, but I digress.) Anyway… the spot that I stopped at was a fitness app of some sort. I’m not sure why it thought I would be interested in that but because I stopped, it is now a certainty that every third post I see should be for a piece of fitness equipment, gym membership, fitness tracker, or athleisureware (or whatever they call call now what we used to call sweat suits back in the day).

For one more time, by January 2, TSA officers confiscated the first gun, which was loaded, in the carryon of a passenger attempting to enter the secure zone of the local airport. You would think on January 2 at the local airport would be the first gun confiscated in all the airports. No, no! It was actually the third weapon pulled from carryon baggage across these freedom loving USs. That’s a little below the weekly average of last year’s record confiscations of 6,301 handguns (88% loaded) but not a bad start. So far, 100% of the guns confiscated have been loaded, and 100% the passenger excuses have been “I forgot!”

And for the final ferinstance, why is it that the Christmas decorations I put away don’t fit into the same totes as they came out of! Sheesh!

Happy New Year. At least I really hope so.

This year resolve to focus on making yourself wealthy without spending a dollar and strengthen yourself without lifting a weight. Take 3 minutes and read how you can start a cascade of good acts at Uplift! on ROAMcare.org.

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Happy New Years +1

Michael 11 Comments

Happy New Year’s Day everybody. Oh, wait. Happy New Year’s Day everybody in the gold old U.S. of A! Yep, that’s what the calendar says. Oh it makes perfect sense. Because the real January 1 falls on a Sunday this year, and horror of horrors and woe to those who would dare to cheat the hardworking citizens of a day off, they “shifted” the holiday to Monday. Of course, those hardworking citizens who now have Monday off all went to work yesterday, which as we now know, was not a holiday. Right?

I’ve railed about Monday holidays before. I don’t know why I find them so distasteful, but I do. Almost as much as the insistence that if a holiday has the nerve to show up on the weekend (talk about anthropomorphizing), it owes those people who are already not working on that day, another day off sometime during the week, preferably at the beginning or end so they can benefit from multiple, consecutive days off. And then there is the worst part about it – it is system that was created by people who barely work at all, politicians(!).

I recently saw a Twitter thread started by an American visiting relatives in England that there it is “illegal” to work more than 48 hours a week. “How does anything ever get done?” queried the Tweeter. The responses ran the gamut from in same countries you don’t even think about working extra to “I work every extra second I must until I know the job is done!” (Yeah, right, and probably sucking up all the overtime possible.) When did going to work, or not going to work, become so competitive?

Look, I know it’s important to have time off and recover and refresh yourself. I also know it’s important we honor certain people and events and to that end we have anointed certain days as special, as holidays. You can have one and still have the other but you don’t have to shift the whole calendar around to accommodate- who? Certainly not everyone.

Maybe I’m just cranky already. In round figures, 2022 was basically a not so happy year. And now I’m figuring if it’s already going to start off bowing to the privileged, this year isn’t going to be any better. It shouldn’t matter to me who gets when off. I worked an entire career when even Sundays were just regular old work days, and I started work back in the day when Sundays were pretty much days off for everybody. Some fields know at some time you’re going to have to work every hour of the day, every day of the year. Not “emergency” calls or responses, but on the schedule, doing the same things you’d do on any random Wednesday.

Today, many of the rest of working humans have caught up with us although there are still a handful of people whose work emails do not end in .gov who will benefit by today’s declared holiday. If you are one of them and you feel a need to go see a movie, fly to some far-off destination, buy a head of romaine or a bottle of aspirin, listen to the radio, report a fire, or visit a friend in the hospital, be nice to the people wearing the uniforms and name tags. To them, it’s just another Monday.

More things I think I think, I think

Michael 2 Comments

Sometimes I think those things that I think and I think what the heck am I thinking? For example for instance like:

We all have had red towels or blue jeans or black shirts that we will not under any circumstances wash with anything else the first maybe 3 or 4 times until the color stops bleeding because we don’t want to pull pink, or robin’s egg blue, or gray clothes from the washer. But we don’t do that with white. Most white textiles don’t start out that white. That’s a dye that makes them white but we happily toss them in the wash right from the get go. Every now and then as we are we sorting and folding and hanging and doing whatever in order to out away those freshly laundered clothes we will look at a load and say, darn, these shirts/jeans/towels/socks and underwear are fading.  Has anybody out there ever considered that maybe they aren’t fading but those new white jeans you tossed in the load had bled white dye? Just wondering.

Or make this for like example:

Remember when I talked about my microwave being a real nag. It still is and it still beeps periodically whenever I’m not in a hurry to take out whatever it was that I put in there. And I asked, who forgets they put food in the microwave? And then I answered myself. Stoners man. Well, I’ve been so intent on making sure I get stuff out of the microwave in a timely manner before it beeps at me, that I never noticed when I open the door, it beeps at me. Why? I know I’m opening the door. Do I have to be warned that I’m opening the microwave door? Who else would care that the microwave is being opened? And then it dawned on me…stoners, man! Those same guys who would stick a bag of popcorn in the microwave and in 90 seconds completely forget about it, are the ones who would want to know if somebody else is making off with their popcorn!

Or sometimes like this:

Regular readers, or even irregular readings if they read the right posts, know I like old movies. Old like 1930s, 1940s, in a pinch maybe early 1950s movies. As far as I’m concerned, and as far as anybody else with half a brain knows, they were just better back then. Really long term readers know I like to read movie credits. They were better back then too. They were certainly easier to read. A casual movie goer has no idea who did the accounting or catering or painted the scenery for Casablanca. As it should be. It seemed sometime in the 60s, when movie making took a decisive down turn in quality, they also wanted the viewer to know everybody who came close to the camera, even the guy who drove the truck that pulled the trailers the movie stars hung out in when they weren’t in front of the camera. It was sometime then they also made a monumental change in the credits besides just crediting everybody and their proverbial brothers. And this one made sense. The copyright date. Sometime in the 60s or maybe 70s, they started publishing the copyright date in Arabic numerals. Those are the numbers like 1,2, 3 (which is weird because they were “invented” in 6th century India) rather than I, II, III (you know, Roman numerals, which oddly really were invented around Rome, or roughly the area that modern day Tuscany occupies). You can read the entire credit crawl of In a Lonely Place and never lose your place until you get to the copyright. Then it’s “hmm, let’s see, MCM, that’s easy 1900. Okay now, XLI… dammit, come back! I almost had it…wait, that’s too many characters anyway. It came out in ’50, that’s just L. Or did it. Oh H-E-double hockey sticks, now I have to go look it up.” Even old books published copyright dates in Roman Numerals. Why couldn’t they have used real numbers then? Was there a law? We got a bunch of other crazy laws, so maybe so.

And then that started me thinking about crazy laws but we’ll let them pass for now.

If you’re curious…In a Lonely Place indeed was released in 1950 (MCML) but the screenplay was copyrighted in 1949 (MCMXLIX).

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0A79A615-12D6-4721-B5A3-2771503E058CWhat’s the most significant day in your life? Did we answer that question last week at www.roamcare.org? Get over there now and read what we said about that!

Check out the rest of our site too, then share us with your friends and family!

 

Brain Dump – Again!

Michael Leave a comment

Welcome to a new edition of “Let’s clear those brain cells!” or “Of all the things I’ve lost, I miss my mind the most.”

IMG_2117Stay in your lane

Well, this fellow actually found his own lane to hang out in. I’m not sure what the laws in your state are but here, that much yellow paint in unmistakable diagonal lines means “no parking.”  This isn’t so bad. At least he isn’t parked in the diagonal blue lines next to a handicap space.  [sigh]

Shopping math, cyber edition

If you haven’t read any of my posts on toilet paper math, go there first. My daughter brought this one to my attention. So many discount, rebate, and coupon sites now are online, and all of them offer to find you the absolute best deal available – compared to regular posted prices. When you load multiple versions you are apt to find one offering you 5% of the regular price but only if you shop at the store with a coupon, another with 2% off the sale price but only if you shop online, or another offering free shipping but only if you buy it in magenta and are willing to answer a 45 question survey first. On a Tuesday. This all started when I mentioned I bought a new iPad last week from Amazon but I could have gotten the same deal at Target and saved 5% with their Red Card. I was all set to do that when it dawned on me that I was using a couple hundred dollars in gift cards that I had gotten by answering a variety of 45 question surveys and that beat 5% any day! [duh]

IMG_2029Old enough to drink

Last month my little car hit a milestone. It turned 21. Actually, It’s nearly 23 now but I don’t count the years before I adopted it. In honor of it’s birthday I had it retitled as a classic vehicle. As a classic I was able to negotiate a replacement price with my insurance company which is a good thing because given its condition, it’s worth more than 2-1/2 times the actual “blue book value.” Oddly enough, now that it is insured for 3 times what it was two months ago, the annual rate dropped by exactly half. I know the insurance company isn’t going to lose money on this deal. Hmm. I wonder if those guys ever took toilet paper math.

samsung-and-apple-logoBrand Disloyalty

I mentioned a few brain cells ago that I recently purchased a new iPad. It replaced a Samsung Galaxy tablet which itself replaced a Nook e-reader, which replaced a Bookman. (If you don’t recognize Bookman, you aren’t missing much. I don’t think it has been around since sometime in the 90s.) For some people, the thought of switching operating systems is absolutely unheard of. Families have been torn apart because someone dared stray from whatever everyone else had. Not me. I can flex. Right now I have an Apple phone and tablet, a Dell laptop and an HP desktop running Windows. The old tablet could mirror with the laptop but the desktop is so old it’s more of a paperweight right now and it only mirrors my reflection in its almost always darkened screen. It’s only the third desktop I’ve owned, the previous was a Gateway (wow, remember them!?) and before that, an Apple. Yes, in 1984 I bought my first Apple which was probably before some of the people who are running that company now were born. I doubt I’ll ever replace the desktop with another Apple. I doubt I’ll ever replace the desktop. When the laptop goes (and boy do they go – I can’t keep track of how many laptops I’ve had), I’ll figure out who has the best deal for what I want to use it for, of there are any deals available, and who has the best coupon code to use. But only after I review my post on toilet paper math.

That’s it for now. See you later!

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Blog Art (14)Did you stop by ROAMcare last week to read our take on “Special are those who plant trees knowing that they shall never sit in their shade,” the counterpoint to my post here last week? If you missed it, you can check it out now at www.roamcare.org. (Later this week we explain the meaning of life in five words! That posts Wednesday, July 20. You’ll want to read that one for sure!)

Revisiting the Middle Seat

Michael 4 Comments

Back in July of 2020, July 9 to be exact, I published “The Middle Seat Hump Syndrome,” a clever little ditty if I say so myself wherein I compared the then fairly new encounter with the coronavirus, which we don’t even call it that any more. Toward the end of an honest to gosh true tale of summer family vacationing, I said with much assurance that we will all be fine in the long run. Guess what? I was right! Politicians, social media “experts” in-laws, naysayers, leftist, rightists, centrists all aside, I was right! We are pretty much okay as long as you don’t ask the 6.35 million people who lost their lives. Yes that number could have been smaller had we paid less attention to the politicians, social media “experts” in-laws, naysayers, leftist, rightists, but we’re stupid so we didn’t. Maybe next time we will.

Because today is the Fourth of July, which of course everybody knows is officially American Independence Day, and because the entire country is out there burning gas we don’t have to pursue their right to a family vacation, I thought I’d regale you again, with “The Middle Seat Hump Sydrome,” with that pesky typo corrected even!

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You need to be of a certain age to remember summer vacations in the family car with enough family that it filled all the seats, three across, and the middle seat made the leg room in coach on Delta look generous for there, right where your feet wanted to be, was “the hump,” the growth in the floorboard that rose nearly to seat level, to allow whatever it was that transferred the up and downs of the engine to the round and round of the rear wheels to make it’s way from the motor to the where the rubber met the road. I am of that age and had been on those vacations and I got that middle seat.

It wasn’t always like that. For a while there were just two of us in the back and we would each get out own window seats with plenty of room between for the picnic basket and cooler that were only opened at planned stops along the way. Then the third one came along. At first it wasn’t such a big deal. She started out in the baby seat in the middle of the front seat (yes, that’s where we put them when we used them back then). After she outgrew that space, she shifted to the back but because those short, stubby legs didn’t even make it off the seat, the hump was not impediment to her comfort. Eventually though, she grew and with that, so did the complaining. “I don’t want to sit on the hump!” And the word came from the front, “take turns.” From then on, whenever the car stopped, the back seat crowd reshuffled, and everyone got a turn being uncomfortable where we decidedly didn’t want to be.

That’s a little like what’s going on in the world now. Each time it appears to be stopping, or at least slowing enough to risk opening the door and get off this crazy ride, the virus comes back, and we have to reshuffle. Do we limit contact, should we close down again, does this mask make my nose look big? Regardless of the answer, some bodies are going to end up decidedly where they don’t want to be doing what they’d rather not be doing or not doing what they’d rather do. Think of the world as an early ’64 Chevrolet and were all taking turns sitting on the hump.

I’m going to spoil the ending for you. It all works out. Nobody was permanently damaged from sitting with a leg there and the other one there. We climbed out of the backseat a little stiff and a little sore but we made. We’ll make it through this also. Maybe a little worse for the wear after this ride that you are certain we got lost on because no way it should be taking this long, but eventually we are going to climb back out into the world.

Middle seat hump syndrome was never that horrible and may have been the inspiration for some future engineer to design SUVs with higher cabins that clear all those mechanical doodads or to shift the driving wheels to the front and obviate the need for a hump running down the middle if the cars interior. Along those same lines it could be someday we might even get to go out and not have to check that we have our masks with us. We just have to wait for the right expert to come up with the right solution. They are out there. There will find it.

In the meanwhile, Happy Motoring!

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